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John Guare, the playwright, once told me that to live in the town where you grew up (in his case, New York) is to turn walking around your neighbourhood into reading your diary: “everything has a history”. I had been in the city for two and a half years at that point – it was 2010 – and I remember very clearly having two simultaneous and contradictory thoughts: I’m so sad I don’t have that, and I’m so happy I don’t have that. You move away from home because every street corner triggers associations and then you spend the next 20 years feeling bad about it.
I mention all this because Lena Dunham has written a long piece in the New Yorker about her own breakup with New York, a sort of homage to Goodbye to All That, the famous Joan Didion essay of 1967 in which Didion left the city for California amid much eloquent and extremely Didionesque agonising about what it all meant. Unlike Didion, who moved to New York when she was 20, Dunham grew up there and in the piece, which is very charming, she itemises all the ways in which she was ill-suited to the place.
As a child, Dunham found New York chaotic, alarming, aggressive and at odds with her nature. “I had been told by countless cabdrivers – soothsayers, all of them – that I seemed like I was from someplace else,” she writes, “because no matter how far off course they drove me, or how late I was running, I always babbled cheerful thank-yous, and unlike other native New Yorkers I had no preferred routes.”
The essay is a piece of long-range publicity for Dunham’s forthcoming Netflix show, Too Much (I mean, I assume that’s what it is; the New Yorker doesn’t allow publicity kickers, so you never know what anything’s for), which is loosely based on her experience of fleeing New York and heartbreak – first for Wales, then for London, a place, it turns out, that suits her much better.
I have loved Dunham’s recent output, from Catherine Called Birdy, the movie she wrote and directed for Amazon, to the pilot she directed for the HBO show Industry, and as Girls enjoys a resurgence among generation Z viewers discovering it for the first time, it’s wild to consider the flak she copped as a 25-year-old – she is now 38 – stewarding six seasons of the show through the system with the grisly resolve of David Chase (the Sopranos creator and a man 40 years her senior).
On the subject of mobility, Dunham makes the point that London appealed to her because it was a “blank slate”, and even though, sadly, moving requires a person to take themselves with them, this is generally why people do it. I have 10 years on Dunham and in my experience it is what eventually drives them home, too – the shallowness of the soil of a place where you didn’t grow up. In my case, returning to London from New York was triggered by an extremely middle-aged moment of realising I didn’t want to die there, not least because I had watched my mother die a long way from home and, although for her England was infinitely preferable to where she started out, I still think something irreplaceable was lost.
Anyway, Dunham is right that in London time moves slightly differently to the way it does in New York. “In New York – the fastest city in the world – days had felt like years,” she writes. “In London, years passed like days, which is how I ended up, five years on, realizing that London is my home now, so much so that I call seltzer ‘sparkling water’ and settle for bagels that taste like caulk.” (Hard identify.) And a move in either direction gives you something to talk and write and make content about for years, too, although as Didion rather snottily observed in her essay, to those who asked why she left New York, “we gave certain stock answers, the answers everyone gives”.
The fact is that it is less the individual qualities of a place that attract or repel than what that place comes to stand for, which is something that can change over time. I was walking down a leafy London street the other day looking at the horse chestnut and hearing the sound of the wood pigeon, and was blown away by the intensity of how both things drew down into my earliest memories – although, of course, I only felt this way because I’d just spent almost two decades going without it.
If, said Guare, you had told him when he was 20 that he would stay in New York all his life, “I would have said, what went wrong? I was sure I’d go and live in California. Then I thought I’d live in London; I love London, but everyone’s so polite. I missed a good fight on the subway.” That he would remain in New York would have struck him as “horrible. Horrible. Horrible. Horrible. Horrible.” And yet as everyone for whom this option, for whatever reason, is denied, it remains the case that if it’s a luxury to leave, it’s a much greater luxury to go home.
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Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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